It’s no secret that environmental factors influence what we feel like buying, not to mention how much. One study even reported that pumping certain odors into a Las Vegas casino actually increased the amount of money patrons fed into slot machines!
A particularly important situational factor is simply how pressed we are for time—and we often feel we are. Many consumers believe they are more pressed for time than ever before—a feeling marketers call time poverty. This feeling appears to be due more to perception than to fact. The reality is that we just have more options for spending our time, so we feel pressured by the weight of all these choices. The average working day at the turn of the twentieth century was 10 hours (six days per week), and women did 27 hours of housework per week, compared to less than five hours weekly now. About a third of Americans report always feeling rushed—up from 25 percent of the population in 1964.[52]
Our experience of time is largely a result of our culture, because different societies have varying perspectives on this experience. To most Western consumers, time is a neatly compartmentalized thing: We wake up in the morning, go to school or work, come home, eat dinner, go out, go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again. We call this perspective linear separable time: Events proceed in an orderly sequence, and “There’s a time and a place for everything.” There is a clear sense of past, present, and future. We perform many activities as the means to some end that will occur later, as when we “save for a rainy day”.
This perspective seems “natural” to us, but not all others share it. Some cultures run on procedural time and ignore the clock completely—people simply decide to do something “when the time is right.” For example, in Burundi people might arrange to meet when the cows return from the watering hole. If you ask someone in Madagascar how long it takes to get to the market, you will get an answer like, “in the time it takes to cook rice”.
Alternatively, in circular or cyclic time, natural cycles, such as the regular occurrence of the seasons, govern people’s sense of time (a perspective many Hispanic cultures share). To these consumers, the notion of the future does not make sense—that time will be much like the present. Because the concept of future value does not exist, these consumers often prefer to buy an inferior product that is available now rather than wait for a better one that may be available later. Also, it is hard to convince people who function on circular time to buy insurance or save for a rainy day when they don’t think in terms of a linear future.
The psychological dimension of time—how we actually experience it—is an important factor in queuing theory, the mathematical study of waiting lines. As we all know, our experience while waiting for something has a big effect on our evaluations of what we get at the end of the wait. Although we assume that something must be pretty good if we have to wait for it, the negative feelings that long waits arouse can quickly turn people off. In a recent survey, NCR Corp. found that standing around the local Department or Division of Motor Vehicles is the most dreaded wait of all. Waiting in line at retail outlets came in a close second, followed by registering at clinics or hospitals, checking in at airports, and ordering at fast-food restaurants or deli counters. On average, consumers estimate that they spend more than two days per year waiting in line for service, and half believe they waste between 30 minutes to two hours each week waiting for service.[53]
Marketers use “tricks” to minimize psychological waiting time (just think about your last visit to Disney World). These techniques range from altering customers’ perceptions of a line’s length to providing distractions that divert attention away from waiting. One hotel chain, after receiving excessive complaints about the wait for elevators, installed mirrors near the elevator banks. People’s natural tendency to check their appearance reduced complaints, even though the actual waiting time was unchanged.